We call it pioneering. It is very enjoyable and can deliver amazing results. We pored over an Ordinance Survey Map and Admiralty Chart to get the picture above and below water, including probable depths, currents, etc. In Mayo the lack of industry, pipelines and maritime traffic means that this is all you need… So what do you look for when searching out a new mark?
Look for small reefs, islands, sandbars, anything that has blocked big ocean-going and inshore commercial boats off the prospective ‘mark’, i.e. anything that might have safeguarded ‘virgin territory’.
We looked at two marks, the first west of Ballycastle, where a small river dives into the sea down a steep valley. Given there were only two of us and with safety uppermost in our thoughts, we decided on the less adventurous mark, east of Easky. The village boasts a decent pier with quite good fishing, but it is most famous for its surfing. As a consequence the town is happily overrun with black clad surfers all year long, even in November.
My casting skills are modest, especially with the move to multiplier reels this year. This new mark will land baited traces into fifteen metres of water with a sub-hundred metre cast. The prevailing wind may help too. The spot we are planning to fish is sheltered from the south and west, a key factor in the autumn and winter. Since there is a ten metre high cliff there, an eighty metre cast should be reasonably easy, even for me.
The main problem in pioneering new marks is there is no one to talk to – the locals will think you are cracked for fishing from wherever you end up, and often they’re absolutely right! Even finding the locals can be tricky. A pier is good if there are boatmen about, but the next best option – if there is no tackle shop – is the local public house. Just make sure to leave it in the same condition as when you walked in! Talking to the local people will give you an indication of where they fish or did fish in times past, for what, with what and in what water or tidal conditions, and the ‘times past’ piece is often crucial…
The BBC’s online weather forecast for Belmullet says Sunday will be windy but the direction is ideal. A westerly will add distance to casts, not drag them down. A quick check of the tide tables finds high water due in late afternoon. With sunset at five we will have a flooding tide to fish in daylight, with the light failing after the peak. Sunday will have an average tide, not a mammoth one, so all things considered it is ideal. On Saturday it blows a rip-roaring gale and never stops raining!
My wife dutifully informs me that the kitchen, dining room and lounge ceilings need a new coat of paint and so off I go to the local paint shop. Somehow I manage to get there via Karl’s house and the vast estuary where millions of blow lug squander their youth! Two hours later, from within heaving sodden raingear, we have forked out two great oily trenches and amassed a hundred blow lugworm. Storm-tossed clams lying in depressions in the tide print, and a miserly collection of peeler crabs from the bladderwrack leaves us sealing the five-litre paint tub with grim satisfaction.
On Sunday… the sun stayed in bed
That chill damp unique to bog land lays claim to my bones. Sunday is so not a pleasant day. Unfortunately for me, Karl arrives around eleven o’clock with the kind of wet nose enthusiasm you see in a golden retriever held housebound for too many days!
A Penn Vendetta beachcaster with a Penn 535 GS loaded with 500 metres of 6.5 kg (15 lb) mono is wiped down. An older 10′ Shakespeare spinning rod – well used to plugging Pike – is the second rod, matched to a Mitchell reel loaded with 200 metres of 4.5 kg (12 lb) mono. My current boat reel is coming, a Daiwa SL30SH with 12 kg (27 lb) mono. Having promised myself an upgrade to a good braid this winter, it can act as an ideal backup. Finally, the battered green tackle box holds all the usual kit and my secret weapon for pioneering new marks – old balancing clips discarded by my local tyre centre, my rotten bottom weights. Fit a few around a coat hangar wire loop and use Blue Tac to hold it together. The Blue Tac sets like concrete in seawater.
Hooks are Kamasan Aberdeens. We use lug tipped off with squid so long shanks are useful. Lots of rigs were put together last week, to save on trying to set up traces with cold wet hands. This is vital when pioneering new marks. With no idea as to the bottom or snags you should expect to lose lots of gear, and if you do not, that’s a bonus.
You can’t beat the old plastic five litre paint tubs – the lids are watertight, they have a decent handle and you can use them to hold leads, bait and fish, with the fish replacing the bait as time goes by… or at least that is the idea!
The coast here is viciously exposed, with wind-slanted trees crawling away over walls from the Atlantic gales. Finally we arrive through the driving rain at Easky. Mass is just finished. The weather is whipping the congregation into cars, newsagents and possibly the pub for a quick one before dinner. We manoeuvre past their cars down towards the pier. It is deserted. Distant white horses are rearing up at a lowering sky. The road runs east from the pier and is wide enough for one car. Just. This rain is hammering at our back windscreen. I am still thinking of a decent seat by the fire, a big mug of coffee and the Sunday papers. A tent would have been ideal, especially one of the reasonably large two-man dome tents that you can erect in seconds… like the one hanging in the garage. Not a pleasant thought as the car jolts along.
Karl is looking expectantly at me, waiting for the signal to abandon our dry car. Heavy socks and Wellingtons with a deep thread and strong heels are donned. The rucksack of towels, flasks and sandwiches comes out. After struggling into our waterproofs, it is a steady heavily laden trudge up that hill, mercifully with a wild wind at our backs. Five minutes sees us looking over a small landslide, fenced off with barbed wire to stop sheep committing suicide. This spot offers us shelter, a level fishing platform is available on a rock shelf below and there is safe access to the water for netting fish ashore.
Initially the big rods get three-hook paternosters, loaded with lugworm and squid and our five ounce home made rotten bottom weights. We keep to small hooks to start with and the first half hour draws a wet blank. Coffee time is decreed, it being miserably chilly, and no sooner do you take your eye off…
Karl’s Painted Codling
Karl’s ancient rod is the first to move, a solid bite that follows a series of small quick knocks. As he draws it in over the surf, we can see a round-bodied fish. Amazingly, a red hued Codling is swung onto the grass. We were expecting a Pollack or a Pouting. A smack on the head sees it deposited in the paint tub, with Karl joking about it getting two coats… of breadcrumbs.
We move up to pennel-rigged 3/0s, on the double, as there had been no problems fouling the bottom. A fine Pollack and a double of Coalfish come to Karl in very quick succession. There are a lot of crabs down there so I put bigger baits on 6/0 hooks. On the top pennel four big lugs get tipped with crab, with the bottom pennel-rig taking six lugs tied sausage fashion. This is punched out eighty yards, deep into the heaving waves. With the tide well in, it is time for the spinning rod. I use an odd rig for a sandy bottom: three one ounce bullets in a neat triangle to roll around the seabed. A small watch lead will work too but it seems to snag more often than the bullets. Two blood-looped 1/0 hooks are set above a flashing spoon attractor flatfish rig. Lug with tiny bits of squid gets lobbed out maybe forty yards, to the seaward side of the last breaking wave.
Coalfish come to Karl but they are small and all of them go back. My new Penn Vendetta has its tip twitching from crabs but nothing decent yet. Given it is such a light spinning rod I could be forgiven for thinking it was a Bass, but with the cursing over, due to weed fouling the line, a fat Flounder of almost a kilo is my first fish. It joins the Codling and a newly baited rig is cast to behind the last wave. Karl is taking in Coalfish and Pollack, nice fish, but no Codling. The light rod takes a tiny Ballan Wrasse, so minute it disappears in your hand!
The fishing continued like this until three when we agreed to a change. The tide was three quarters full so we took to lobbing baits forty yards out. The light rod continued to take Flounder, and a small Plaice, all returned. Finally the Penn nods with some determination. When I picked it up, tightened the drag and began to reel in, the fish hooks itself. Karl took up the light rod, which was twitching beside me. I check my footing and start to bring in the fish. Seaweed catching on the line hampers the retrieve but after Karl whips in yet another undersized Dab, he scuttles down the rocks below with the net in one hand and the flattie in the other. This fish has to be a Pollack, obvious from the surging dives but I am really surprised by its raw power. This has to be huge! It takes five long minutes to bring it up off the bottom. A glimpse of it in the surf suggests it will be decent, but nothing special. Disappointed, I lead it in towards Karl, and use a large incoming breaker to bring it over a rock ledge onto his boots. Only then did we see the second Pollack!
The double, averaging three kilos each, explains the power of those surges – when they dived together, there was just no holding them. They are both returned alive. Baits were barely lobbed into the sea under our feet. Big baits on 6/0 hooks were the order – we had loads of bait and it was getting dark prematurely due to heavy cloud. These short casts revealed foul ground, with leads lost off traces from sharp rocks and a fair amount of abrasion, possibly from barnacles or mussels. We took to baiting spare traces, mainly to avoid problems with abrasion accumulating on any individual trace.
The spinning rod was fishing well and had taken another plump Flounder but that ideal spot behind the last breaking wave was racing past us. We were getting so much action on the big rods from heaving Pollack – with the odd Wrasse thrown in for variety and small shoaling Coalfish – that we could have done without it. Karl took a full treble of Coalfish at one point. He switched to small Hookai lures, bouncing them along the bottom, taking lots of decent fish and losing my “Blue Tac” weights for fun! My own rod with big lug/crab/squid baits was working but producing very little by comparison to Karl. With half an hour to high water Karl’s “painted” our second Codling of the day off the mark.
Karl got ‘bored’ with hauling double shots of Pollack and Coalfish up the cliff. He switched to a single wire traced 6/0 on a pulley loaded with almost all of the remaining lugworm, a crab, strips of squid, in fact it was a regular triple-decker club sandwich! This got lobbed out forty yards. Since the spinning rod was not working I took it in, wiped it down with baby-wipes (handy stuff) and holstered it. That left the two beachcaster rods working, both loaded with massive baits hoping for a final big fish. It had started to rain steadily again. With the wind rising, I trekked back to the car, ferrying the rucksack and light rod back. On my return, Karl had the new rod bent into a fish.
Moving Seaweed
“I think it’s only a big load of seaweed,” he said, but I scrambled down to the water. Slowly Karl eased a vast raft of weed towards me, having mastered the knack of using the waves. Amid the spray I grabbed the line in one hand and a big lump of weed in the other. There was something underneath it. It was a Bull Huss, a decent fish albeit no specimen, but a new species for us and as it happens, Karl’s first ever Huss. I roared the news up at him and he was so chuffed he skittered down the cliff to see himself. Of course he had only gone and left his own rod fishing for itself alone up top! It was getting so dark and wet now; we decided to call it quits with probably another hour of fishing left.
We took in Pollack, Coalfish, Wrasse, Dabs and Flounder, two Codling, and Karl’s first Bull Huss. Let me tell you, it is not always this good! Pioneering new marks demands patience and a willingness to appear to be a total fool. In four years we have had as many blanks as successes, but when you find a new hot spot, it is hard to keep a smile off your face for the rest of the week!
Safety First and Always
If you fancy pioneering, then bring some friends – the more, the safer. Show someone exactly where you are going on a map. Write down when they should expect to see you and your mobile phone number. Check the phone coverage when you get there. A handheld VHF phone is better, and even an EPIRB is a good idea in remote locations. Stick as close to the car as possible. Since pioneering takes you away from ‘civilisation’, a medical kit, warm blankets, cooking equipment and a tent or bivvy should be brought to the mark or held in reserve in the car. If this seems like an awful load, then organise a group of anglers to share in the entertainment.
Tight lines. As they say hereabouts, “may the wind always be at your back”!
kieran.hanrahan@sea-angling-ireland.org
PO Box 59, Castlebar PO, Castlebar, Co. Mayo, Ireland.
